Low Impact

Dispensers like this can reduce the amount of waste from hotels

We recently came back from a short holiday away.  The holiday was short, but the distance was long – around 1200 kilometres each way!  We drove the Prius, and as you can see from the sidebar tracking my progress against my New Years Resolutions, its made quite a dent in my “allowance” of 10,000km!

We travelled in stages, stopping off for a night along the way.  In one of the hotels we stayed at, I noticed the dispensers you can see in the image on the left.  Maybe this is common in some parts of the world, but this is the first time I’ve come across such a thing.  In case the picture isn’t clear, rather than supply you with little “single use” bottles of shampoo, conditioner and single use soaps, they’ve provided a dispenser. And the little caption on the dispenser explains (for the squeamish amongst us) that the dispensers are sanitised after each guest.

Such a simple idea, but one that could have a huge impact on the amount of waste that a hotel sends to landfill.  To take a simple example, lets assume a 100 bed hotel typically has to service 70% of its rooms each day as guests come and go (I have no idea of industry averages, but you’ll get the idea).  So, in a year, that hotel will do 365 x 70 = 25,500 room changes.

A dispenser in the shower for shampoo and conditioner

The dispenser concept gets rid of all that wasted packaging, as well as the actual wasted product.  Looking at it from the hotel’s point of view, not only are they helping the environment, but there’s also potential dollars to be saved by reducing wastage.

Sure, it takes away from the “fun” of leaving your hotel with your toiletry bag packed full of oh-so-cute mini-shampoos.  But, in this case, I think the pros might just outweigh the cons….

Categories: environment, reduce

Tags: packaging, waste